San Juan Parangaricutiro, Mexico — in this town found in Michoacan state, the heartland of world production of the fruit which locals call “green gold,” small-scale avocado growers guard this treasure of theirs as they arm themselves with AR-15 rifles and take turns manning a vigilante checkpoint. They guard their “green gold” against thieves and drug cartel extortionists.
What’s with their avocados that make it so important? What makes this crop worth fighting for?
This is the nine-year-old girl Pearl Johnson. Over the course of four days and three nights in mid-September, she climbed the Triple Direct route on El Capitan, which earned her the title of the youngest person to ascend the 3,000-foot formulation.
Pearl climbed with her mother, Janet, and a family friend, Nick Sullens, of Yosemite Search and Rescue. Pearl’s dad, Philip, a law enforcement ranger in the park, met them at the top.
“Someone asked me if I was nervous, and I said ‘No,’” Janet said after. “I knew I was comfortable up there. I’ve climbed a lot with Pearl. I knew what she was capable of.”
But the same cannot be said of Pearl. She was nervous as she climbed.
“A lot of time was spent overcoming her fear,” Sullens said. “I was impressed with her wanting to keep going. If it were me at nine, I would have wanted to be out of there. Sometimes she would say, ‘I want this to be over, this is really scary.’ I would offer to bail and be down in two hours, and she would say she wanted to be there. She had a desire to pursue the goal. She wanted to climb that mountain.”
6-year old Ethan Haus and his dog, Remington, got lost while playing outside their home near Elk River, Minnesota. Law enforcement officers and 600 volunteers began searching for him as night fell.
Among them was Steve Fines, a commercial drone operator. He used one of his drones equipped with a heat sensor to search for the child from the sky. Fines found the boy lying in a cornfield with his dog as the night temperature dropped to 30°F. ABC News reports:
Ethan was seen, with his dog Remington, around 1:50 a.m. Wednesday lying down in a cornfield a little more than a mile east of his home, Sheriff Joel Brott said in a statement.
When first responders reached Ethan, he was cold but otherwise in good health, according to Brott.
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The global launch of Huawei’s flagship phone, the Mate 30, has been delayed indefinitely thanks to the ban on Huawei from using Google’s services. Inside China, however, the phone has been selling extremely well, as it moved a million units in its first weekend, and reached three million units by the second week.
Those numbers have helped the Chinese tech giant keep up its solid financial figures despite ongoing scrutiny from the U.S. government. In third-quarter financial results released today, Huawei reported total revenue of 610.8 billion yuan ($86.1 billion) and 185 million phones sold, the former a 24.4% over the same nine-month period of 2018, and the latter about on par with last year’s pace.
The company, however, did not specify figures specific to Q3. Instead, it only gave 2019 totals up to September. The special accounting methods suggest that Huawei’s third quarter numbers may have not met the company’s expectations. Ben Sin of Forbes writes:
After doing some math using numbers from Q1 and H1 results, we can deduce that Huawei sold 67 million phones in Q3, which is a jump from Q2’s 59 million. These figures include all Huawei and Honor handsets, so they include budget phones like Honor 9X all the way up to the flagship Mate 30 Pro. But it is likely the Mate 30’s smashing success in China that is driving the bulk of the growth. Huawei declined to break down how much of the 67 million units were sold in China, but if I were to venture a guess, I’d say most, as the lack of Google apps is a major dealbreaker for consumers in Europe, Singapore, and well, everywhere outside of China.
I think it’s still quite a feat for a company to be able to still millions of phones despite the backlash. What do you think?
Sam Bowman was a computational linguist at New York University. In the fall of 2017, Bowman figured out that computers were not very good at understanding the written word. While they had become competent in showing understanding in certain narrow domains, like automatic translation and determining if a sentence sounds “nice” or “mean”, Bowman was not yet satisfied, and he made a test. He wanted measurable evidence of the genuine article: a genuine, human-style reading comprehension in English.
In an April 2018 paper coauthored with collaborators from the University of Washington and DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, Bowman introduced a battery of nine reading-comprehension tasks for computers called GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation). The test was designed as “a fairly representative sample of what the research community thought were interesting challenges,” said Bowman, but also “pretty straightforward for humans.” For example, one task asks whether a sentence is true based on information offered in a preceding sentence. If you can tell that “President Trump landed in Iraq for the start of a seven-day visit” implies that “President Trump is on an overseas visit,” you’ve just passed.
The machines bombed. Even state-of-the-art neural networks scored no higher than 69 out of 100 across all nine tasks: a D-plus, in letter grade terms. Bowman and his coauthors weren’t surprised. Neural networks — layers of computational connections built in a crude approximation of how neurons communicate within mammalian brains — had shown promise in the field of “natural language processing” (NLP), but the researchers weren’t convinced that these systems were learning anything substantial about language itself. And GLUE seemed to prove it. “These early results indicate that solving GLUE is beyond the capabilities of current models and methods,” Bowman and his coauthors wrote.
But that was not the end of it. In October 2018, Google introduced a new method which scored a GLUE score of 80.5. It was BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). In just a span of six months, the machines have jumped from a D-plus to a B-minus.
Still, the question lingers: can these machines understand? Or is is just getting better at gaming our systems?
Social networking sites sure have their own domain. Facebook is for those lengthy political rants.Twitter, on the other hand, is for arguments and professional brags. Finally, there is Instagram, for vacation photos.
Instagram stories, however, are a small oasis. While your friends might post their most polished photos or flattering selfies with thoughtful captions to their grids, their stories are a glimpse into their actual everyday: a car they saw with a horrible custom plate, screenshots of a funny text conversation, messy karaoke videos.
The result is a more intimate feel with your friends. Aside from this, by showing you the users who watched your story and giving you the power to block them, Instagram gives you the fantasy that you have some sort of control over your content, and over who makes up your audience.
It’s a fun exercise in narcissism, too; a high-viewer account suggests importance, and it’s easy to convince yourself that views from particular people—a new acquaintance, an ex—mean something.
Jane C. Hu is a small-time Instagrammer. Usually, her stories are viewed by her mother-in-law, her friends, and those she knows from school and work. That changed earlier this year, however.
Strangers were viewing my story. Intrigued, I clicked on each profile to see if we had mutual friends or interests, but mostly we didn’t. It was unclear why an “actor/singer/model” named Jonathan with 5,000 followers would watch videos of my dog, or how a granite countertop company in Marshfield, Massachusetts—a town I’ve never visited—even found my account.
Turns out, the possible culprit for this are bots.
Humans like songs that are familiar sounding and a little bit unpredictable, according to a new study published in the neuroscience journal JNeurosci. The study suggests that our musical preferences might be grounded in the way we humans learn.
It’s fun to consider what that might sound like.
A Drake take on “Let it Be”? Ed Sheeran snapping out a nice remix of “White Christmas”? A Taylor Swift update of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”?
[...]
The study results correspond with insights into how the brain learns best: challenges and new situations of medium complexity provide the most enrichment with the least frustration.
If you want to dance the Monster Mash or the Time Warp, here's the music for it! All these movie monsters are played by Peter Hollens, who also did the singing. The medley shifts into high gear toward the end, when the songs all blend together.
Burger King debuted the “Ghost Whopper” right in time for Halloween. The limited edition burger is actually a regular burger with a white cheddar cheese-flavored sesame-seed bun. Watch as psychic medium Riz Mizra executed a “spirit taste test’ for the Ghost Whopper’s advertisement. If you’d like to feel the spook through food, you can try the burger at 10 locations across the US starting October 24, at the price of $4.59!
If you visit an old-fashioned pub, you may see a metal or wooden rail along at ankle height around the bar. These rails emerged by the late Nineteenth Century. Why did they become popular? Wayne Curtis of the magazine Inbibe explains that they were footrests that encouraged drinkers to relax while standing, and therefore buy more drinks:
Foot rails are both altruistic and mercenary. They’re altruistic because they’re installed for the comfort of the drinker. They’re mercenary because the more comfortable drinkers are, the more they’ll spend. A modest investment in a foot rail can evidently lead to a pleasing return.
Turns out, humans aren’t really designed to stand for long periods with feet flat on the floor. This contributes to stress on the spine, and you can feel it in your lower back. A foot rail allows us to redistribute the load on our feet—first one foot, then the other—and alter the tilt of our spines. “Bartenders were probably the first ergonomics experts on the planet,” write the authors of Deskbound, a 2016 book about the hazards of the sedentary life. “A standing-height drinking table that you can lean on, with a place to rest your foot? Genius.”
But brief lunchtime visits to bars faded away as a common practice, and so did this piece of furniture designed to facilitate standing:
Foot rails faded in importance for a simple reason: The workingman’s saloon, where one knocked back a shot or two and then quickly returned to work, were replaced by bars where people lingered. “Belly up to the bar” was not a facile metaphor, but a reasonably exact description of what one did. Then barkeeps found that if they added stools, people would linger and order more. (See: “mercenary.”) Today, the foot rail persists in a feral fashion, sometimes inconveniently. The legs of bar stools bump into them; the feet of customers can get entangled when dethroning, especially if tipsy.
This is an interesting hypothesis. But I'd like to suggest another. While composing this blog post, I selected the above photo, which describes the brass sheet in front of the foot rail as a "spit trough". Googling around led me to learn that some bars used to have troughs where customers could spit or pee without leaving their chosen spot. Sam Sessa wrote in 2010 for the Baltimore Sunthat:
If the pub was packed full of people and you were lucky enough to have a spot at the bar, you weren't going to want to risk losing it by walking to the bathroom. But when nature calls, sooner or later, you have to pick up the phone.
What to do?
To solve the problem, bars began installing impromptu urinals underneath the bars. They were stainless steal troughs with a faucet at one end and a drain at the other. That way, the beer could go in one end and out the other at the same time.
The recall for 33,000 bottles of Johnson’s Baby Powder was done after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found trace amounts of asbestos in one of its bottles. The recall for the single lot of baby powder is bad news for the company, as they are still facing a lot of lawsuits that claim their baby powders causes cancer. This is the first time the company recalled its baby powder over asbestos concerns, EcoWatch detailed:
Even though the company reported nearly $82 billion in sales last year, and its products line store shelves and pharmacy counters with brands like Tylenol and Band-Aid, it is facing over 100,000 lawsuits questioning the safety of its products, according to the New York Times.
"I understand today's recall may be concerning to all those individuals who may have used the affected lot of baby powder," Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Ned Sharpless said in a statement on Friday, as CNN reported. "I want to assure everyone that the agency takes these concerns seriously and that we are committed to our mandate of protecting the public health."
"The FDA continues to test cosmetic products that contain talc for the presence of asbestos to protect Americans from potential health risks," Sharpless said, according to CNN.
If you have a bottle of baby powder from lot #2318RB, don’t use it, and contact the company for a refund!
In Japan, the clear plastic umbrella is a staple. This handy companion for the rain can be found in kiosks, drugstores, and supermarkets. Sold yearly in a whopping amount of 120-130 million units, one can tell that these umbrellas are used so often. But did you know that these clear plastic umbrellas were invented over half a century ago? White Rose, one of the few remaining Japanese makers (as China’s cheap disposable ones dominate the market) of the clear brollies invented the clear plastic umbrella. White Rose umbrellas of today are unlike the ones found in convenience stores, Japan Times explained:
The detail and craftsmanship that goes into a White Rose plastic umbrella, Sudo says, are the result of firsthand insight gathered from decades of trial and error, ever since the company produced its first plastic umbrella in the 1950s.
What cemented White Rose’s image as the go-to manufacturer for high-end plastic umbrellas, however, was when it received a request from the Imperial Household Agency in the 2010s to design an umbrella for Empress Emerita Michiko’s outdoor appointments.
Sudo attributes White Rose’s survival to the popularity of the upscale image its products. A signboard with the words “Purveyor to the Imperial Household Agency” now accompanies pop-up shops White Rose opens in department stores, and it continues to collaborate with other companies to create special-edition umbrellas.
As a family-run business, its production numbers may be limited, but, he says, every year it sells out of all its 12,000 to 13,000 umbrellas made.
This may look like an entry in a Photoshop contest, but it's not. It's an example of vivipary, in which seeds germinate before their time. Vivipary is natural, but not normal in tomatoes. There are some plants that reproduce this way, but not ones you'd normally find in the produce section.
Fruits contain a hormone that prevents seeds from germinating. Once the fruit dies or the seeds are removed, the seeds are no longer exposed to these chemicals and can germinate freely. These hormones are necessary to allow the fruit to ripen and fall to the ground where conditions are more favorable for the young plant to survive. But sometimes that hormone runs out, and the seed starts germinating. You might have seen it in your tomatoes that are sitting around on the counter for far too long. This can also happen when the environment is warm and wet tricking the seeds into believing that they are in moist soil.
Here's a World War II story you haven't heard, but would make a great movie in the vein of The Monuments Men or Inglourious Basterds. American engineer and surveyor Major Floyd W. Hough was the leader of a highly-classified military intelligence team with the clout to move freely in the war zone, even though no one knew what they were up to. Each member of HOUGHTEAM was selected for their particular set of skills, which might remind you of a cinematic heist team. They spread across Europe, gathering the spoils of war. They weren't after treasure, but information: maps and important geodetic surveys that took the earth's curvature into account to precisely plot locations. This data was more crucial than ever in waging a war of long-distance air missions. HOUGHTEAM carried 1,800 pounds of cameras and equipment to record captured data in microfilm. In the early years of the war, they mostly stayed behind enemy lines.
Hough remained busy. When the Belgians requested help microfilming some survey data and secret lists of artillery coordinates, he was happy to oblige—and saw to it that an extra copy was sent to Washington without the Belgians’ knowledge. When the French city of Strasbourg was recaptured by the Allies, his men removed a cache of top-quality German survey equipment before the French had a chance to claim the gear for themselves.
If an obstacle arose, Hough was willing to get creative. After several neutral countries balked at letting Espenshade and Shallenberger search their institutes and libraries, Hough procured letters from the Library of Congress certifying the men as its representatives engaged in bibliographic research. A similar ploy got Shallenberger into the pope’s private library at the Vatican, which was strictly off-limits to members of any military, owing to the Vatican’s status of neutrality.
Finally, by early March, the Allied forces resumed their eastward progress and were poised to cross the Rhine into the German heartland. HOUGHTEAM’s window of opportunity was opening.
It was when the Allied forces began taking German towns that HOUGHTEAM really went into high gear, particularly in areas that would be ceded to the Soviets after the war. Read the exploits of the super-secret intelligence unit in the November issue of Smithsonian.
